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Things are collapsing in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of the author's masterful trilogies set in a world that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or reorganizing themselves along new and disquieting lines. An invisible force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "currency is failing, and no one knows why". Power is draining from authorities, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of conglomerates, the control of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Things we thought were firm and solid are weakening and giving way."

Core Enigma and The Protagonist's Path

Just what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the question that drives The Rose Field, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, according to many, the author's final foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of Northern Lights. It's a domain whose geography corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals look and reason and behave like us, but are paired by external spirits, beings in creature form; where the heavens are filled with enchantresses and legendary creatures, but below, transports are ridden and drinks is sipped, and mature academics carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first encountered as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a infant in the prequel, the prequel with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still clearly the sharp and tenacious heroine of the earlier books, but older, sadder, warier, less sure. This circumscription is amplified by her separation from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, paradoxically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.

Interwoven Plots

Pan's decision to depart in quest of that youthful part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he epitomises as her "creativity"), and her mission to reunite with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which chronicled Lyra undertake a wandering trek across the continent and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and danger on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in play, and sinister powers at work. The Magisterium – the church's ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie incarnation of rigid, bureaucratic wickedness – is under fresh command, and showing its strength. Marcel Delamare – the heroine's uncle, who faults her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the position of president of the Magisterium's governing body, and is intent on using his fresh authority to expand the religion's control. A key character, who saved infant Lyra to security along a swollen Thames as an child in La Belle Sauvage, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to learn more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and costly botanical extract which manifests mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and financial upheaval rippling out from Central Asia. The oil is regarded by various factions as a tradeable good, by alternate groups as a research-based or mystical phenomenon, and by further factions – the extremist "highland figures" – as a wellspring of malevolence; an affront that must be destroyed. The question of its origins, its significance, and if it should be eliminated or protected is becoming urgent.

Like the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her future, are shown to be deeply connected with the fate of the universe

In The Secret Commonwealth, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. As in the original series, the protagonist's movements and her destiny are shown to be deeply linked with the fate of the universe. Her individual quest to rejoin with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the key conflict in a wider battle with an authoritarian regime which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to quell freedom of reason, creativity and art: all the internal, resistant ways in which people can be independent.

Cosmic Openings and Moral Battles

The novel opens with the unveiling of a collection of curious fissures in the structure of the world's atmosphere: portals that seem to lead to different dimensions. One such portal seems to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with its leader at its helm, designates these portals as a threat to the church's doctrine and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict rationalism and back to instinct, nevertheless, her conviction that these sites must be defended – that their significance and their value is somehow crucial – increases. "The substance, or the extract, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we need it." The setting for a poetic struggle between naivety and maturity is prepared.

Narrative Pacing and Protagonist Growth

At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the